Creativity Quote by Eugene Ormandy

A conductor confessing that obedience can be its own kind of failure. Ormandy’s line is built on a delicious paradox: the notes may be “right” on the page, yet the moment he “listens” to them as fixed law, they turn “wrong.” It’s a musician’s way of describing the gap between correctness and truth. In orchestral culture, the score is treated like scripture, and the conductor is supposed to be its faithful interpreter. Ormandy—often pegged as a master of sheen and precision with the Philadelphia Orchestra—winks at that expectation while quietly undermining it.

The specific intent is practical, not mystical. He’s pointing to the danger of literalism: dynamics, tempo, balance, and phrasing can’t be solved by compliance alone. “Listening” here isn’t basic auditory attention; it’s the temptation to defer to what’s written instead of what the room, the players, and the moment demand. A note can be correct in pitch and duration and still sabotage the musical line if it’s weighted wrong, placed wrong, or colored wrong.

The subtext is authority without arrogance. Ormandy isn’t rejecting composers; he’s defending interpretation as an active, ethical act. Great performance involves informed betrayal: you honor the score by knowing when to bend it, because the score is a map, not the terrain. Coming from a 20th-century conductor navigating recording-era perfectionism and increasingly standardized orchestral technique, the remark reads like a warning against turning music into paperwork. The “wrong” he fears is the lifeless kind: accurate, polished, and dead on arrival.